Board of Advisors

Posted on: February 15th, 2022

This is the fifth installment of an interview between Seth Morgan, Founder and CEO of MLA Companies and Stone Payton of Business RadioX Studios. In this section they discuss the benefits of a board of advisors.

Seth ended the previous section with this statement: “We believe that those who sit around the table and have to make the decisions should be held responsible for them.”

Are you wondering who should have a seat at the table? MLA has helped form advisory boards for our clients. Let us help you with that.

A Seat at the Table

Stone: You’ve mentioned a board of advisors. Can you speak to that? What’s the value of a board and how would a small, medium size business go about creating one?

Seth: Having a board is a real opportunity that when carefully used can be of great service. I’ve seen clients of ours implement a board of advisors but not use them. So it takes some work to do it right.

The downside of a board is that if it’s not set up correctly it can simply become a nuisance. There’s a level of embarrassment if you’re not ready for that board meeting. And, if you’re constantly educating those board members on what it looks like to operate inside your industry, you’re not going to get much value out of that.

What you’re going to end up doing is wasting your time, if you put some money behind it, probably wasting that. That’s frustrating for the board members, and frustrating for yourself. And it’s just going to be another one of those things that sucks life out of you as an entrepreneur.

Board of Advisors

When we thought about our board of advisors, we tried to take a different approach. We spent a little bit of time asking, “What are we trying to accomplish here?” One of the original goals was to get the organization comfortable with the idea that we had a board, and that the CEO was going to be accountable to a group of people.

That was very intentional for the purpose of thinking about my future, and MLA’s future. If our goal is to transfer value, including financial value beyond me as the founder, then we have to have a group of men and women who can take that governing responsibility and oversee it.

Our goal is to share that wealth and ownership among a group of minority owners with a CEO being selected, perhaps among from them, perhaps from the outside, and then the board oversees and and gives governance to that.